P's silence & intentions

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy

My position is not that authorial intentions should be ignored when
they can be known or teased out of the record, but that those gleanings
may constrict and constrain the fullest possible experience of a
complex work of art. Remember P's line "Beethoven never got beyond
statements of intent"? Hasn't that character (which one? damn...it's
gone, another one gone...), focused as he seems on his own perceptions
of articulable "intent", a rather pinched and blinkered perception of
works of art we must assume knows intimately?

Mark

--- Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com> wrote:
> "Authorial intentions" is a hot-button term, certainly on the P-list 
> if not elsewhere. Some P-listers doubt we can ever know anything 
> certain about Pynchon's intentions, and wouldn't believe Pynchon if 
> he explained his intentions in detail, or would disregard same in 
> favor of their own readings; that's fine, no problemo.  I also 
> understand that some readers believe that the process of artistic 
> creation lies in the domain of unconscious actitivity that is beyond 
> the artist's control, and I agree with that as far as it goes. 
> Through revision and editing, the artist (or, in P's case, his 
> editors, too) does exert some conscious control on the finished work,
> 
> however. Most art, after all, results from a combination of 
> inspiration and the hard work of drafting, revising, editing; 
> extremely rare are works that flow unedited from the pen.  The idea 
> that you can divorce a work of art entirely from the artist is absurd
> 
> (for the simple reason that no artist = no work of art; I won't 
> respond to attacks on this statment because I've been on that P-list 
> merry-go-round before); although I certainly agree that you can 
> choose to ignore the artist and focus on the work instead, and that 
> this choice can lead to meaningful, significant criticism.
> 
> Mark Wright AIA notes "Pynchon's silence about himself and his work."
> 
> I don't agree that P's been silent; he may have said and written less
> 
> about himself and his work than other writers have done, but what he 
> has done along these lines is not nothing.  He directly addresses 
> himself and his work, in some detail, in his introduction to _Slow 
> Learner_; I understand that some scholars believe this may be an 
> elaborate exercise in deception on Pynchon's part, but I tend to 
> disagree with that evaluation. In his essays, book reviews, and 
> introductions for other novels, he reveals much about his interests, 
> and he often comments therein on issues that we find more fully 
> developed in his fiction (his comments in the Luddite essay, about 
> the factory system, German rocket program, death camps, and Manhattan
> 
> Project, for example; you can also find much that illuminates his 
> fiction in his essays on Sloth,  his review of _Love in the Time of 
> Cholera_; etc.). Tracing his sources -- many of which have been well 
> and clearly established by Pynchon scholars -- tells us a lot about 
> what he read, and studying how  this source material has been 
> transformed in his fiction can tell us a lot, too.  I understand that
> 
> these sources lie outside the texts of P's fictions, and I understand
> 
> that some hide-bound critics would therefore not permit their 
> consideration in the reading and interpretation of a particular text,
> 
> GR for example; that's fine, too, but that's not a rule I choose to 
> honor.
> -- 
> 
> d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n 
<http://www.online-journalist.com>


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/